Haunted by Auschwitz: TV star suffers nightmares after horror visit

WHEN Chris Tarrant dedicated an episode of his Channel 5 Extreme Railways series to Hitler's death trains he knew it would be harrowing. But he had no idea that the experience would leave him deeply troubled.

Chris admits that he is still haunted by a visit to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and the memory of what he saw etched on the walls and the descriptions of how the inmates died have left him suffering from nightmares.

"The worst bit for me was the scratches up the wall," says the TV presenter. "My God. The dying, the screaming, everyone climbing over each other to get out.

"Even now, months after filming, it's still very raw in my own mind. I've had bad nights, waking up full of people screaming."

Chris travelled to Auschwitz in Poland with former prisoner, Arek Hersh, 90. Arek was only nine years old when his parents were killed by the SS. By the age of 11 he was put to work on Hitler's railway of death - building the tracks that would carry millions to be murdered.

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Like everything else in Nazi Germany, the death railways were meticulously planned and even tried out by supporters at the beginning of the war in the Third Reich's spiritual home, Nuremberg.

Indeed the programme Hitler's Holocaust Railways starts in the Bavarian city which became synonymous with mass rallies, and after the war with the trials of top Nazis. It was there that hundreds of thousands of Nazi supporters gathered in carefully choreographed mass displays of power in the 1920s and 1930s.

A station was constructed with walkways leading from the platform to the Zeppelinfeld rally ground and to the camps where supporters stayed and from whence they were herded around.

"It was at these rallies where they learned about the power of the railways," says Chris, "because all the people who got there, got there by train. That's where they learned about mass movement of people."

THE WALLS CRY OUT: Chris in the gas chambers, etched with death (Image: Channel 5)

As they perfected the running of the network and set about extending it, the model the Nazis had tried and tested at Nuremberg was utilised for altogether more horrifying purposes.

With the invasion of Poland and the official declaration of war in 1939, Hitler put into effect his Final Solution - the complete extermination of the Jewish people.

Jews were first moved into ghettoes and then transported to extermination camps where they were murdered on an industrial scale.

By the end of the war six million had been killed, about two-thirds of the entire Jewish population of Europe.

More than three million Jews and other socalled Untermenschen - "subhumans" - such as the mentally and physically disabled, gypsies, Eastern Europeans and political dissidents - were exterminated at the death camps.

Holocaust trains were run by the Deutsche Reichsbahn national railway system under strict supervision and historians suggest that without the mass transportation of the railways the scale of the Final Solution would not have been possible.

The successful execution of Hitler's plot to rid the world of people considered a threat to his dream of an Aryan super race was dependent on two factors: efficient killing at the camps and railways running at full capacity to ensure the constant flow of victims.

END OF THE LINE: Auschwitz survivor Arek (Image: Channel 5)

"Originally we had the thought of looking at Nazi Germany and seeing just how important the railways were to Hitler," Chris says.

"And then once you start researching you realise that without the railways there simply wouldn't have been a war. And without the railways there wouldn't have been the Holocaust.

"The researchers believe that at the height of the slaughter you could arrive and be ashes within 15 minutes. And the high command in Berlin were saying, 'More, more, faster, faster.' It's utterly horrendous, the scale of it."

As Chris travels through the former Czechoslovakia and into Poland, he meets Helga Weissova, who was 12 when she and her family were forcibly relocated to Terezin, a former garrison town converted into a ghetto and concentration camp in the Czech Republic, along with 150,000 other Jews.

Tens of thousands died at Terezin and more still, including Helga's father, were shipped off to Auschwitz.

"They heard rumours but they didn't know for sure what was going on, where people were going, what was happening to them," Chris says.

"And they began to fear this word: Transport. Transport meant bad things. When people were transported, they didn't come back.

Arek arrived on one of the Nazi trains as a boy but managed to escape the gas chambers (Image: Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images)

"Helga told me her most vivid memory was looking out of the window one day and seeing nine boys who had been brought in, and they were being punished for the sin of writing home to their mummies. Like: Dear Mummy, I'm OK, I'm fine.

"And they were all hanged. All nine of them in a line. For writing home to mum."

If Chris's face darkens as he recalls the encounter he becomes more sombre still as he recalls meeting Arek, who worked on those railways. "He thought he would be knocking in sleepers or whatever. But his job was mainly wheelbarrowing dead bodies," says Chris.

"Two thousand five hundred worked on this railway and within less than a year they were down to 10, and one of them was him."

Arek was moved to the ghetto at Lodz in Poland and then when he was 13 he was put on a train to Auschwitz. In one of the most harrowing sequences of the programme, Chris accompanies Arek back to the death camp 77 years after he first arrived there.

"When Arek got off the train at Auschwitz he was put into the left-hand line," says Chris.

"And he's only a little boy but he must have been sharp because he looked around and thought: I'm in a line here with old women, old men, children... and the right-hand line is full of comparatively fit young men and women.

"And there was a diversion when the SS grabbed a baby off a woman and she started screaming and in the commotion he shoots across to the right-hand queue. I mean..." he tails off and shakes his head. "Blimey."

The Extreme Railways presenter Chris Tarrant (R) in front of the former concentration camp with Arek (Image: Channel 5)

When Arek reached the front of that queue he was asked his age and what his trade was. He lied and told them he was 17 and a tailor.

"So he tells me this and I ask him, could you sew?" says Chris. "And he laughs and says, 'No, I'd never even sewed a f****** button on. But I figured it was a good skill to have.'

"And it worked. He stayed in the right-hand queue and as it turns out he never had to prove he could sew anyway as the only work he did there was digging holes for bodies."

Chris’s own reaction to his experience at the death camp surprised him "Some of it made me angry," he says. "I don't know what I thought I was going to feel but then when we filmed in Auschwitz and listening to Arek I did get very upset and then very angry."

The worst part, he says, was filming in one of the gas chambers. "It was one of the most vile, horrible, traumatic things I've ever done," he says, shaking his head.

"I thought I was going to be physically sick. I couldn't speak because you know what happened there.

"You're in a completely empty place and yet you know that within living memory a thousand people at a time were murdered here. Hundreds of thousands of people. It's just horrific."

A working, restored kriegslok locomotive (Image: Channel 5)

Chris is profoundly affected by the suffering of the victims he met and says it was important that their stories were told. "I'm also incredibly proud of this film," he says.

"God bless them, but the likes of Arek and Helga won't be around for much longer. And it's so important that their stories must be told and told and told.

"It's so important for us to remember what happened and to hopefully prevent anything like it ever happening again."

Hitler's Holocaust Railways With Chris Tarrant is on Channel 5 on Sunday, October 28 at 9pm.